Eva Ibbotson

“Ach, specialists, what do they know? I believe nothing.” She turned her head restlessly on the pillow and pierced Harriet with her eyes. “It will not last, this love of yours, you know that?”

“Yes, I know. At least, it will for me but not for him. He is going back to the place in England where he was born and there is a woman there who…” But this did not seem to be a sentence that one finished.

“Yes, yes. It is always so. Dancers, singers… we are for pleasure, but it is others who become the châtelaines of great estates. So you must see that you get some jewels and you must work and work. Remember what Grisha always tells you about your shoulders—the left one in particular.”

“Yes, Madame, I will. And I will never forget your Odette—or your Giselle—not if I live for a hundred years. Never, never will I forget them.”

“And my Lise?” came Simonova’s sharp voice from the bed. “My Lise in Fille—what was wrong with my Use?”

“Your Lise too.” Harriet was close to tears. “To have been in your company even for such a short time has been the greatest privilege in the world.”

“You are a good girl. Now I must rest for the journey, but first…” She seemed to be coming to some decision, a frown etching deep lines into the worn forehead. “Yes, I will do it. Go over there to that blue suitcase.”

Harriet stepped round the stretcher lying ready to convey Madame to the boat and found the case.

“Lift the lid. There is a pair of ballet shoes on top—my last pair. The pair I wore when I had my accident. Take them out and bring them here to me.”

Harriet did so and Simonova seized them in her bony hands, stroked the pink silk with one long finger as a mother traces the features of an infant in her arms. “See,” she said tenderly, “they are hardly worn; I fell so soon. They should go to a museum perhaps—the last shoes of Galina Simonova—but who goes to museums? Take them. They are for you.”

Harriet, unashamedly crying now, shook her head. “No, Madame, I can’t! There must be someone who… matters more.”

, “Masha Repin, perhaps,” sneered the ballerina. “Or that pretty friend of yours who thinks only of restaurants. Take them. Take them quickly. And now go!”

It was a very long time before the three friends slept that night. Marie-Claude had a great deal to tell them, for Vincent had secured his auberge and she was to be married in December. “And it’s because of you, ‘arriette. You made it possible for Vincent to give the deposit and never, never will I forget what you have done.”

As they talked sleepily in their beds it seemed that Kirstin, too, might soon hang up her dancing shoes, for there was a young man in a village on the Baltic not far from the town were she had been born—a childhood friend who for a long time had been willing to be something more. His father owned a fleet of trawlers which Leif would inherit and he had never been to the ballet in his life, which to Kirstin was very much in his favor. “I don’t know,” she said now. “It may not work out, but I think I will go back and see. It’s such a pretty place—the red wooden houses, and the water…”

“So you see, it is you who must be a great dancer, ‘arriette,” said Marie-Claude, “so that we can bring our children to see you and tell them that with this divine prima ballerina assoluta we once shared a horrible room full of cockroaches in the city of Manaus.” She sighed, seeing Harriet’s face. “But of course it is this man you want for always—and no wonder,” she said, motioning to a froth of pale green muslin on the chair: the dress she had bought at Verney’s insistence when shopping for Harriet.

“Perhaps this earl’s granddaughter to whom he goes in England no longer loves him?” suggested Kirstin. “Perhaps she has met someone else?”

“And then when he has recovered from his broken heart, he can put you into a villa in some suitable district with your own carriage. In Paris it would be somewhere near the Bois… or in St. Cloud, perhaps, but in London I don’t know…”