Light Fantastique (2 page)

Chapter Two

Théâtre Bohème, 1 December 1870

“Now as for you…” Madame St. Jean turned to Johann, and he had to take his eyes from the retreating figure of her daughter. He made it a policy not to ogle young women when their mothers were present—he'd almost gotten trapped into marriage that way once—but he couldn't help himself. Since Rome, he'd found himself slipping in his policies around Marie, and he'd need to find a new distraction soon. One that would stick or at least do a better job of getting her out of his head.

“What about me?” he asked with the lopsided grin he used to charm women of all ages.

“I have been looking for a first violin who can lead the stage orchestra in the Overture and Entr'acte pieces with the kind of emotion Berlioz's music deserves. So far I have not found anyone, but I have heard you play.”

“You've heard me practice,” Johann corrected her. “Not play. I'm taking a break from performing in large venues at the moment.”

“I am aware of your reputation, Maestro. All of it.” She fixed him with her glittering black stare. “And need I remind you that you and your friends have been staying under my roof with no recompense to this point?”

“Professor Bailey and Mister O'Connell are working on a new lighting system for you, and I believe Doctor Radcliffe set one of your stage hand's broken wrist a few weeks ago,” Johann pointed out.

“Working on is not the same as installing or fixing, and all of you owe me more than a set wrist.”

Johann took a deep breath and did what he usually did when faced with a difficult woman, ask what she truly wanted. Not just from him, but from life. The answer came to him—Madame wanted to have control down to the smallest detail. She acted with the aggressiveness of someone who had let it slip once and had lost a great deal. He wondered if it had something to do with her hatred of Parnaby Cobb and the past connection with him that Marie refused to talk about.

Then he asked himself how he could use the situation to his advantage. Not getting kicked out and having to return to England and face the men who wanted to kill him seemed beneficial enough for the moment. Not that he was going anywhere during the siege. No one was, at least not unless they could bribe their way on to an airship.

“I'll look at the score,” he said, unwilling to give all the way.

“
Bien.
” She walked to the orchestra pit—without the aid of her cane, he noticed—reached down to a shelf, and gave him a first violin score. “This should not be difficult for you.”

“I'm sure it won't be.”
Especially since I've played the
Symphonie Fantastique
before.
But again, he wasn't going to say it. He'd learned the hard way not to reveal all his advantages in antagonistic situations like this. But he also knew there was more to the situation than Madame St. Jean let on.

* * * * *

Iris ascended the steps to the multi-story townhouse Madame St. Jean owned next to the theatre. A year ago, Iris had been living in a modest but nice house in a little town in England with her father. She had few friends since other young middle-class women didn't share her interests in archeology and science. Now she attended the new French
Ecole d'Archaeologie
and shared a room with—
how scandalous!—
an actress, who also served as a maid when Iris needed some extra help, although she was proud she could mostly take care of herself. And she had friends, a strange group, to be sure, but friends nonetheless.

The first person she saw when she crossed the threshold was the member of the group she liked least but perhaps understood the best, for they'd both had to deal with the aftermath of dangerous secrets coming to light. She tried to be pleasant to him for that reason and because he was the best friend of her almost fiancé, Professor Edward Bailey. And today she was happy to find him alone because a question had grown in her mind over the past few months since she'd returned to Paris after her father's funeral.

“Good afternoon, Maestro Bledsoe.”

“Good afternoon, Mademoiselle McTavish.” He sat in the parlor with his violin on its stand beside him and a score spread on the table in front of him. “How were your exams?”

“Fine. We should have our results by the end of next week.” She tried not to say too much about her studies because she didn't want to bore the others. She'd alienated friends in the past by going on too much about sarcophagi and coins. Now she tried to figure out the best way to broach the subject on her mind. Heart, really. “What are you doing?”

He looked up from the music in front of him and ran a hand through his hair. It had gotten long in Paris, and he'd grown a beard. He looked like a bohemian musician, particularly when agitated gesturing made his curls loosen and stand in a blond nimbus around his head.

Like he's the scruffy angel of the Théâtre Bohème.

Her cheeks heated with the thought.

“I'm being put to work with the orchestra,” he said. “Madame St. Jean is impatient. We've not made enough progress with the lighting system to please her.”

“Oh.” Iris glanced up the stairs, where she knew Professor Edward Bailey, the author of her greatest joy and anxiety, toiled in his laboratory in the converted attic workshop. Or at least she thought he was. She tried not to disturb him, but the few times she'd been up there to tell him it was a mealtime or bring him a delivery, she'd found him gazing at the biscuit-sized swirling aether in its glass globe. He never seemed to move much beyond that. As for Patrick O'Connell, the tinkerer/engineer who was working on converting the theatre's lighting system so it could be used once Edward made enough aether gas—whenever he figured out how—Iris suspected he protected Edward out of sympathy for his mental state. She'd come to find the Irishman liked to exaggerate for dramatic effect, but also to shield those to whom he was fiercely loyal.

“Yes,” Bledsoe said with a sigh, “have you heard the
Symphonie Fantastique
by the late Hector Berlioz?”

“Only the snippets they've been rehearsing for the production.” Iris imitated the disapproving look on her former headmistress's face and intoned, “Young ladies do not listen to scandalous music from the continent.”

The musician's beard made his smile seem all the wider and emphasized the evenness of his teeth. “So you're getting an education in many things these days.”

And many things I'm not.
With that thought, Iris placed her books on the hall table but didn't enter the parlor so she at least wouldn't be unchaperoned in the same room as a bachelor with a rake's reputation. Her current living situation had caused her to become good at finding loopholes to Victorian convention, particularly since the French had a tendency to flaunt silly societal rules. So she continued to talk to him from just beyond the doorframe and fidgeted, wanting to ask him but not wanting to seem foolish.

Finally, she blurted it out.

“Why hasn't Edward kissed me since Italy?”

All right, it was a clumsy way of asking, but she'd got it out.

“Doesn't he still love me?” she clarified. She wouldn't meet Bledsoe's eyes, and the music she focused on blurred so the notes slid across their scored terraces.

“I believe he does still care a great deal for you. You know his limitations,” he said, but his tone was gentle, not chiding.

“Everything seemed fine when I went back to England for father's funeral. And Jeremy Scott's,” she added. “But when I came back, Edward was different, distant. Was it because I went to Jeremy's funeral? I didn't want to tell him, but I promised I'd never lie to him ever again, and…” She had to stop and breathe. She could understand Edward's reticence on some level. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't shake the feeling that if she had handled the situation differently, the odious Lord Jeremy Scott would still be alive and with a better understanding of her. Intellectually she knew his death at Edward's hands was the best possible outcome—aside from Edward having a part in it, of course—and that he would have never ceased pursuing her, but she couldn't shake the memory of his heartbroken family.

“Yes, you had to tell him you attended Lord Scott's services,” the musician said in a gentle tone. “Edward broke the strictest of his rules in the underground temple, and it's taking him a while to recover. Radcliffe said that sometimes when someone has experienced a great upheaval, they snap back to their previous way of being in spite of progress made.”

“But how long is it going to take before he returns to how he was?” Iris chewed her lip and reminded herself not to. It was a bad habit she'd picked up since coming to Paris.

“Has another young man caught your fancy?” Bledsoe asked.

“N-no,” Iris stammered. Although she thought his beard quite dashing, she didn't feel that way about Bledsoe. And the young French men in the archeology institute generally ignored her in favor of the few French women there. She didn't mind—she was accustomed to being an outsider—but she was glad for the holiday break.

“You're sure.”

Iris blinked, but not fast enough to keep the tears inside her eyes. She wiped them from her cheeks, which stung from the salt sliding across the sensitive skin—the air had teeth lately. “Yes! How could you be cruel like this? I care for Edward. I had just hoped…”

He stood and crossed the room so he stood in front of her. He tilted her chin up with one finger so she had to meet his eyes. “You hoped that something in you would transform something in him, like the meeting of two elements to make a new substance,” he finished for her.

She pulled away and looked down at the pattern on the rug. “It sounds so ridiculous when you say it like that.”

“Your hope isn't ridiculous. But like the aether experiments, it will take time before the effect you have on Edward becomes something of significance.”

“Why are you being so kind?” she asked and moved away from him. “It will ruin your reputation as an insensitive cad.”

He glanced back toward the theatre, and his grin returned. “Perhaps I like to keep you guessing.”

Iris shook her head and grabbed her books from the table.

Men are incomprehensible.

* * * * *

Edward heard Iris's voice below talking to Johann. He couldn't make out the words, but she sounded upset. He put his head in his hands. She never showed that side of herself to him, not since returning from her father's funeral in England. Now he only saw the false bright smile she put on every time she saw him.

As much as he tried not to be jealous of his friend and the ease with which she spoke to the musician, he was. But he didn't want to frighten her with his dark thoughts, and they had become dark indeed since his first attempt at integrating the aether into a mock theatre lighting system a few days before. Patrick O'Connell, his partner in engineering, hadn't said anything, but he'd been remarkably absent since.

Edward tried to do something himself earlier that day, injecting a little of the aether gas into the part of the system they had set up in the corner, but he could only get so far with just two hands and his improving but still basic understanding of engineering.

The footsteps that ascended the stairs was too heavy to be Iris but too light to be the Irishman. As Edward anticipated, Johann poked his head around the laboratory door, his lips drawn back in a grin too wide to be innocent, but not big enough to hint at diabolical scheming. Wary, Edward drew back.

“I thought you couldn't do the experiments without sunlight,” Johann said and moved toward the window, which was covered by heavy curtains.

“Don't touch that. The aether light is fine.” Edward gestured to the writhing opalescent mass of light and color in the center of the glass globe in front of him. “I'm seeing how long it takes for it to decay without light. I'm still unsure what its fuel is.”

Johann sat on the stool beside Edward's. “That makes sense. Wouldn't want it to disappear in the middle of a performance. How long has this one been going?”

“One week.”
Yes, keep talking about the experiment. Don't make me discuss other things.

Now Johann raised an eyebrow. “You must be anticipating some long plays.”

“I'm being thorough.” There, that would keep the questions coming. There were always questions. He used to like being the one to ask them, but now…

“Or you're avoiding something.” Johann stood and walked to the window, where he yanked back the curtains. Watery late autumn sunlight poured through, and Edward squinted.

“Now you've ruined my experiment!”

“It's been a week, Edward. We don't have time to waste.”

Edward decided not to argue about how he spent his days because then he would have to talk about things he wanted to ponder further. Thus, a change of subject was in order. “Your hair and beard are getting longer,” he said. “You look like a wastrel.”

“You have no room to talk—you look like a vagabond. How long have you been up here without a break?”

Edward looked at the aether mass. “I don't know. The servants bring me food and take the trays away. They also manage water for quick washes and the chamber pot at the appropriate times. O'Connell reminds me when I need to rest. What more do I need?” He stuck his shaking hands between his legs and squeezed so his friend wouldn't notice his tremors.

“What more, indeed? You've reverted back to how you were before we left England last summer. Worse, actually. At least then you'd talk to people.” Johann resumed his seat and leaned in close to the aether chamber. “I could watch this stuff all day.”

“Don't get so close!” Edward shoved him away.

“Fine, I'll wear goggles.”