The Kingdom of Bones

FORTY-FIVE

Louise was idly studying the crowd all around her. For a moment, she was looking straight at him. Then her gaze moved on, and left him unrecognized.

Sayers started forward. He saw her become aware that someone was approaching. He saw her composing herself, the beginnings of a polite smile. Then he saw the smile fade as he drew nearer and recognition dawned.

“Tom,” she said as he finally stood before her.

No words seemed quite adequate to the moment, so he simply said, “I see that your eyesight hasn’t improved.”

She’d grown pale. “Tell me that this is just some incredible chance.”

He shook his head to assure her that it was not.

She went blank for a moment and then said, “You sent me the invitation.”

“How else would I catch you without a bodyguard?” he said, and then to reassure her he added, “I’m here alone.”

She studied him narrowly. He could see that she was trying to work out what his presence implied.

“How did you find me?” she said.

“Mary D’Alroy? The name of your part in The Purple Diamond? You might as well have sent me a signal. I was in Richmond. They found the man who died there. Don’t worry, I’m not going to turn you in. But there’s a Pinkerton man who will if he gets the chance.”

“You seem to have me where you want me,” she said, and glanced all around as if trapped.

“You don’t understand,” he said. No one was paying them any attention, but anyone close by might overhear their business. He said, “I’ve much to say to you. Can we go somewhere else?”

From the lobby behind the foyer, staircases led to all parts of the house. The various tiers were named in the French manner, from les loges for the Dress Circle all the way up to le paradis at the top of the house. They ascended one level and found relative privacy in the Circle.

The dance went on below. A few couples had come up here to rest and flirt. The great opera house stage loomed before them, its cloth painted and lit to represent a starry night sky.

She was tense and wary, but seemed to have recovered from the initial shock of seeing him. They took a couple of seats in an empty section but even as they sat, the Dress Circle was starting to fill. People were coming up from below in anticipation of the tableaux.

She said, “You’re looking well, Tom.”

“Am I,” he said, not really believing it.

“Yes, you are. I’m glad they didn’t hang you.”

“Not half as glad as I.”

She smiled for a moment, but it didn’t stay. “So, tell me,” she said. “Why, Tom? Why are you here?”

He hesitated, and glanced down at the dancers. Each couple moved with their own purpose but, seen from above, all combined into a swirling pattern like a stream passing over stones.

He said, “There’s something you have to know.”

“If you’ve chased me halfway around the world to declare your love for me,” she said, “don’t. It’s wasted on me. I can never deserve it.”

Sayers said, “I thought we were great friends, once.”

Her cheek twitched as she recalled. “My devoted servant,” she said.

“I know I had some small place in your affections then,” he said, “but I was no James Caspar. Do you still believe I took him from you?”

She looked away, out toward the stage. “No,” she said. “I know exactly what I was to him. And what he would have done to me, had I given him the chance. It can make no difference now.”

“I’m here to tell you that you can return to the world. If you’ll choose it.”

“Believe me, Tom,” she said. “There is so much you cannot know.”

“You thought you would marry. He seduced you ahead of the wedding. You saw no wrong in it and felt no shame. But in the weeks after he died, you found yourself with child. Whitlock procured an abortion for you.”

She seemed about to deny it, but he said, “I saw you, Louise. I followed you that night. I saw you go into that doctor’s house, and if you pressed me I could tell you exactly what went on inside.”

She stared. “You’ve always known this?”

“What do you think I would do? Consider you spoiled, and turn away? Caspar set out to destroy you for his own amusement. Whitlock continued the work so you could serve a purpose of his own. But Louise, you are not destroyed. You think you’re cursed beyond forgiveness. I know all about the life you’ve led since. But if I can pick myself up from in front of a train and forgive you…If I can face the loss of my name and my reputation and forgive you…If I can live in dirt and love no other and still forgive you…You don’t have to love me, but will you not do me the sheer common courtesy of at least trying to forgive yourself?”

She opened her mouth to speak. But he could see that she was at a loss.

She looked away. Her hand flew to her lips. She tried to draw a breath but could not take one deep enough. Her color had become alarming.

When she started to sway, he quickly gathered her up, catching her as he had on that moving train so many years before. She was now a little more substantial, and he was a little less spry.

No matter. Looking to remove her from public view, he carried her into the narrow passageway that led all the way around the backs of the loges.

He pushed open a door and took her inside, settling her onto one of the four ornate chairs that he found there.

These boxes offered more privacy than most. Each was screened from the rest of the Dress Circle by a lattice. Total seclusion could be obtained by the release of a velvet curtain that was tied back with a tasseled silk rope.

When Louise began to revive after a minute or so, Sayers said, “No wonder you fainted. Forgive me, but I loosened your stays.”

“The dress is a size too small,” she admitted. “I rented it.”

“This suit is from Wardrobe,” Sayers said. “I got in as a waiter.”

“What a sorry pair of frauds we are.”

Then, after the thought had sunk in, she said, “You loosened my stays? There was a time when you were embarrassed to look me in the eye.”

“Life with the carnival can knock the innocence out of a man,” he said. “I pulled three drunk women naked out of a river one Christmas Eve.”

“What were they doing?”

“They called it frolicking. I call it drowning. Or freezing to death. Take your choice.”

“Did they thank you?”

“With abuse the like of which you have never heard. Two of them had husbands. We were chased out of town.”

She sighed and looked down. “You’d still have your old life if it wasn’t for me,” she said. “I wish I deserved you.”

“Old life, new life, it’s all one,” Sayers said. “Nothing stands still. Don’t you hear yourself? How does that square with the soulless thing you suppose yourself to be?”

Down below, the waltz ended and the orchestra struck up a patriotic song. Attention began turning toward the stage.

Louise said, “I kept the name of Mary D’Alroy because of a document I needed to use. I had some foolish notion that I might be able to stop moving around and find myself a new place in the world. That’s the kick in the Wanderer’s curse. It’s not the commitment you make in a moment of self-hatred. It’s when the moment has passed, and you realize that you’ve traveled too far down your chosen road to go back.”

“Suppose there were no such road. I have a friend who would argue that the Wanderer’s contract is only a construct of the human imagination. One by which we once lived, but whose day has now gone.”

“What use is that to us, Tom? We’re creatures of our time.”

“What time would that be? I’ve been living for tomorrow. You for yesterday. You’re right, Louise. We are a sorry pair of frauds.”

The stage lighting came up on the first of the tableaux down below. The house applauded. Sayers barely gave it a glance. Something with ships and waves and Napoléon.

As the cheers rang out below, she said, “I think I knew that James Caspar was rotten when I fell for him. Then, when he died, I just continued to fall. I saw no way out. I came to consider myself a lost soul.”

“Lost to whom, Louise?” he said. “Never to me. In all these years, there has not been an hour in which I have not thought of you.”

“I’ve taken life.”

“With intent? I don’t think you have. Be honest, Louise. Name me one man that you’ve actively struck down.”

For a long time, she watched the stage. Her expression gave no indication of what was going through her mind, but he did not want to interrupt her. Down before the audience, the French army was on the march. Spain was involved in it, too, somewhere, and the Spirit of America under an enormous waving banner.

“I know how the games work,” he said. “I know how they die. No one seeks it. But sometimes it happens. The risk is the pleasure. And the risk is their own.”

“Tom,” she said. “I’ve told you I cannot love you. I believe that all possibility of love has died in me. But I do wish it were not so.”

She looked at him then. He understood that look.

While it was true that he had loved no other, his had not been a life entirely without female company and the occasional rehearsal.

“What are you saying?”

She closed her eyes for a moment, as if reaching deep into her memory, and said, “That there can be passions and appetites which are neither loathsome nor unnatural, but which celebrate God and the way that he meant us to be.”

Then she opened her eyes again.

“Here?” he said.

She looked around the box and said, “Why not?”

“No, Louise,” he said. “Not like this.”

“It’s not wrong.”

“It is if you feel nothing for me.”

“That’s my point. No other has loved me. I cannot say what I may feel.”

On the stage, the actor playing James Monroe was holding up a rolled parchment to represent the treaty. Louise stood up and unhooked the silk rope so that the box’s velvet curtain fell free. Then she drew the curtain all the way around and across, screening them not only from the Dress Circle but from the rest of the theater as well. That vast auditorium was suddenly reduced to one small and private space. Now they had no light other than that which spilled in from around the edges of the velvet, and the fan of yellow from under the door to the access passageway behind them.

She stood there, a shadow in shadows.

“Wait,” he said, and he got up and moved to the back of the box where he threw the latch on the door.

Then he turned to her and said, “Louise, you ought to know there is no way I can refuse you. But do not enter into this just to reward me and then walk away.”

“Tom,” she said. “That’s not my intention. I tried to extinguish my own spirit. You make me think it still lives. Bring me back. If anyone can do it, you can.”

Off came her gloves, and then she reached for the fastening on the rented gown.

“Help me with this,” she said.

He could barely keep his hands from shaking. A few moments later, the gown slithered to the floor of the box.

He said, “I have dreamed of this moment in one form or another.”

“I know,” she said. Stitches tore in his frock coat as he struggled out of it. On the other side of the door, there was a heavy-footed rumbling in the corridor; someone rattled it against the latch and then moved on to try elsewhere, with muffled voices and giggling.

“Please,” he said, “don’t be offended by the tattoo. A moment of folly from my drinking days.”

“I think that’s enough talking for now,” she said.

Sayers began to explain how the Chinese tattooist had come to misspell her name. But he seemed to lose the power of speech as she drew the last of her layers over her head and off. She held out the chemise and let it fall at arm’s length. It was not so dark that she did not glow, pale as white moonlight. With her arm outstretched and her weight resting on one foot, it was as if she knew exactly the effect that her pose would have on him. So profound was Sayers’ appreciation of it, he thought that he would faint.

The floor of the opera house box was of hard, painted boards.

As if that mattered.