Eva Ibbotson

“Yes.”

Harriet had returned from her luncheon date with a blind, lost look that had made Dubrov want to shake the handsome and generous Mr. Verney. Since then, saying nothing to anyone, she had worked if anything harder than before. It should have been a relief to be free of the child’s enthusiasms; Dubrov had suffered as much as anyone from Harriet’s determination to befriend the loathsome vultures that sat on the verandah of the hotel, holding out their black wings to dry after the rain, or the glad cries with which she announced the presence of a green and crimson frog who had taken refuge in the showers. But to see her become once more the quiet resigned girl she had been in Cambridge was hard.

“What happened?” Marie-Claude had demanded of Kirstin, returning to find Harriet white and silent, practicing at the bane. And reproaching herself: “I should have stayed to see to her toilette.”

“Oh, Marie-Claude, everything isn’t clothes. I saw how he looked at her when she came out of the stage-door. It was a misunderstanding, a quarrel—it must have been.”

Her summons to Dubrov’s office filled Harriet with alarm. Had he discovered after all that she had stood in for Marie-Claude?

“You are to be the swan at the window instead of Olga,” announced Dubrov, adding firmly, “It is an extremely small part and naturally there will be no increase in privileges. Or in pay.

“Oh!” Her thin face lit up. Whatever happened there was still work. “But why me—surely one of the others… ?”

“It was Madame Simonova’s suggestion. Grisha will show you the movements after lunch. Then we shall rehearse once with the lights before the performance. You go on tonight, of course.”

“Tonight! I can’t…” she began to say, and stopped. For she could, as a matter of fact. This she could do.

Simonova herself attended the rehearsal, as did Dubrov and a surprising number of the cast. Harriet learned the steps quickly and indeed there was little enough to do except stand on her pointes and flutter her piteous arms. Nor was it possible for her to miss her cue for it was the swan motif itself, with its haunting oboes, that heralded her brief entrance. In half an hour it was clear that Harriet would manage, and indeed there was no girl in the corps who could not have managed this unexacting task.

All the same, those who watched her were in their different ways displeased.

“Poor child! It is a mistake to be like that,” said Simonova, flopping down on the bed when she was back in her room at the Metropole. “Of course, it is good for one’s dancing afterward.” She took off her shoes and dropped them on the floor. “What was the name of that hussar, do you remember? In the Rodenzky regiment? The year I met you.”

“Count Zugarovitch,” said Dubrov, coming to sit beside her on the bed. The young blue-eyed hussar had been killed in a duel soon afterward and he could afford to be magnanimous.

“Yes. It is because of him that I am unsurpassed in Giselle,” said Simonova with her usual modesty. “Still, it is awful, this love.” She laid her head with unaccustomed tenderness against his shoulder—a gesture which, though it was intended for the dead hussar, Dubrov proceeded to turn to good account.

Marie-Claude, accosting Harriet as she changed in the chorus dressing room, was simply angry.

“There is no need for you to act like that; it is only a rehearsal and the whole scene will be played behind gauzes and there is no extra pay.”

“Like what?” asked Harriet, bewildered.

“As though you were really suffering. As though you were really outside and lost and frightened and looking in on happiness from which you were excluded et tout ça. It is not necessary,” raged Marie-Claude.

“You are certainly a good actress, Harriet,” said Kirstin. “You seemed absolutely anguished.”

“Did I?” Harriet was surprised. “It’s just that I know… what it is like. I know how it is to be at a window… outside… and look in on a lighted room and not be able to make anybody hear.”

“How can you know? You have not experienced it.”

Harriet hung Odette’s glittering crown on a peg above the mirror and reached for her comb. “Perhaps I am going to one day,” she said. “There is a man in England who says that time is curved and that we can sometimes see…”

But Marie-Claude was entirely uninterested in metaphysical theories about time. “It is only necessary to do the steps,” she snapped.

And after all Marie-Claude was right, for when Harriet came on that night she was just a distant, half-lit figure vanishing in an instant—and the only man who might have known that it was Harriet and not Olga who trembled and beckoned at the window was a hundred miles away.

Chapter Nine

“Eat, Coronel,” begged Furo, pushing the tin plate toward his master.