Read Online Die Upon a Kiss by Barbara Hambly - Free Book Online

words were exchanged.”
    “It’s still a long way from high words,” countered January, “to a dagger in an alley in the night.”
    The corps de ballet was coming in, in twos and threes, arms around one another’s waists or glancing daggers at rivals. Gossamer skirts, tight-brushed hair.
Did you
see him looking at you from the wings, chérie? I could see the
love in his eyes. . . .
    “Little rats,” they were called in Paris. Some of the Sicilian girls were as dark as Rose was, the Milanese nearly as fair as Madame Scie. Many had been hired in Havana, and having failed to find wealthy protectors in Cuba had come to try their luck in New Orleans—Spanish girls, or octoroons fair enough to claim Spanish, with names like Columbina or Ignacita or Natividad. There were one or two French girls, and French Creole girls hired locally, and they looked at the Habañeros and said things like “chaca” and “catchoupine.”
I hate to be the one to tell you,
sweetest, but I’m your friend and someone has to. . . .
    Among them, like a splendid flamingo among doves, moved the gorgeous flame-haired, long-limbed Oona Flaherty, whose admission to the corps had been the price James Caldwell was willing to pay to have Fitzhugh Trulove in the St. Mary Opera Society.
    Darling, he treats me just like I was a princess! We had
ices at the Café Venise, and rode in his carriage along the
levee. Afterward . . .
    January wasn’t sure, but he suspected that the choice of
La Muette de Portici
had had as much to do with Trulove’s passion for Oona as with Belaggio’s desire to steal a march on John Davis. In that passionate tale of Spanish domination, Neapolitan revolt, seduction, romance, and volcanic eruption, La Flaherty was dancing the part of the Mute Girl, a prospect to make anyone shudder.
    “Were it not for the dagger you saw,” remarked Madame Scie, counting off the girls with a chill gray eye, “I would wonder if perhaps the intention was mayhem rather than murder. It is, in fact, common enough in the South”—she meant south of Rome—“for a nobleman, if annoyed by a plebeian, to have his lackeys chastise the offender for his presumption. It was done in France as well, of course, in my father’s time. But I agree,” she added, glancing at the bandaged lump under January’s left sleeve with the condescension of eleven generations of marquises de Vermandois, “that the knife came into use quickly.”
    “Has that ever happened to Belaggio?” January turned around in the rush-bottomed chair and commenced warming up his hands with the simplified version of the “Rondo à la Turque” that he used for his students. In keeping with everything else in the American Theater, the piano was the best to be had, a massive iron-framed Babcock grand with the heavy action typical of English instruments.
    Madame Scie shook her head. “For the simple reason that he worked with Incantobelli. His partner, you understand.” She walked to the barre again, and taking second position, sketched a couple of demi-pliés, which the more perceptive of the girls watched and imitated at once.
    “A man not only talented, but brilliant. And charming—he had the dukes and princes of Naples, the senators of Venice, quarreling like schoolgirls over who would sit next to him at receptions. When I worked with the two of them at the San Carlos in Milan in ’twenty-seven, it was obvious Belaggio could barely endure it. He was never one to be outshone. Perhaps it was only that which finally caused the break between them. I don’t know. Girls!” She clapped her hands sharply. “Two demis and a grande, port-de-corps— So. First, second, fourth, fifth. Sixty-four bars, if you would, M’sieu Janvier.”
    January played snippets of polonaises,
valses brilliantes,
and simplified rondos for the dancers to warm up, during which time he was conscious of a constant coming and going around the rehearsal-room door. Lions gazing at gazelles, it was called in