Hazel couldn’t force her face into a smile. She looked at Bernard, and all she saw was that smug, blank look on his face from that day on the street. When we were children, he had said. If he only knew what she was capable of doing! If he only knew what she had seen!
Lady Sinnett elbowed Hazel hard in the ribs. “Very well, thank you, Cousin,” Hazel said coolly.
“We trust we’ll see you down in London for the Season, Bernard?” Hazel’s mother said quickly, smiling like a serpent. “Hazel has so been looking forward to the masquerade ball that the duke always throws at Delmont, haven’t you, darling?”
Hazel looked away. “Mmmm,” she said.
“I wouldn’t miss it,” Bernard said. “Ah! It appears as though my father is calling me to our box. If you’ll excuse me, ladies.” He bowed again and swept away into the crowd.
Hazel and her mother made their way up the rest of the stairs to their own seats, in a box on the upper right side of the theater. The curtain, thick and dusty velvet in acid green, hung in front of the stage. The orchestra was still warming up, and Hazel took the time to scan the crowd to see who else had come out tonight.
Bernard and Lord Almont were sitting in a box across the theater next to, of all people, the Hartwick-Ellis twins, Cecilia and Gibbs. Hazel hadn’t seen Cecilia for some time—when was the last time? Since the Morris ball? That was a summer ago. Cecilia had grown taller; her neck was long and narrow as a stork’s. She had always been fair; tonight her blond hair was curled into ringlets on either side of her head. Hazel couldn’t miss them, nobody could; she was shaking them about from side to side, trying to get the light to catch them while she giggled obscenely. Her brother, Gibbs, looked glum as always, a blond boy whose eyes, nose, and mouth all seemed too small and too close together on a face large as a dinner plate.
“Cecilia looks well,” Hazel said to her mother.
Lady Sinnett didn’t reply. Her eyes were fixed like daggers on Cecilia and, Hazel saw, on Bernard. Bernard, who seemed to be laughing along with Cecilia, who happily dodged each assault by her ringlets and genially patted her gloved hand when she clasped his hands in hers. Were they … flirting? It wasn’t possible. Cecilia Hartwick-Ellis had about as much personality as a bowl of rice pudding. The pair of them—Cecilia and Gibbs—probably couldn’t count to five if they started at four. They certainly hadn’t read that many books between them.
At that moment, Cecilia gave a laugh so ridiculous and false that Hazel heard it from across the theater. And Bernard—Bernard seemed to enjoy it. There was a flush creeping up his neck onto his cheeks. He had done something different with his hair tonight—it was swept forward and his sideburns were long, as if he were pretending to be that scandalous poet Lord Byron. Bernard whispered something into Cecilia’s ear and she laughed again, throwing her head back and making her curls shake. Hazel couldn’t stand to look at it. She wasn’t sure whom she was more embarrassed for.
Finally, the gaslights of the theater dimmed and the orchestra began to play, a dreary dirge in a minor key. When the curtain parted, it revealed a stage nearly empty. The backdrop was a misty moor, all gray and brown, with a false dead and gnarled tree and a low-hanging orange moon. A redheaded dancer in a white flowy gown like a nightdress pranced onto the stage, soon joined by a man who was supposed to be her husband. Hazel tried to focus on the plot and ignore what was happening in the box across the theater. In the dance, the woman’s husband was called away to some vague and distant war, and the woman grew depressed in his absence, swirling herself across the stage and reaching her arms toward the heavens—or rather, the rafters above. Every day, the woman went to her window to wait for her love, and every day she was disappointed.
And then a man does come, a man dressed in all black with the mustache of a villain and dark, willful eyes, wearing the jacket of her former lover. Perhaps it is her lover, back from the war, the woman thinks! They dance together, she’s seduced. But as they dance, the mysterious man’s costume falls away. He wasn’t her husband after all; he was the Devil himself. Bereft at her mistake and betrayal, the woman pulls a dagger from her writing desk and stabs it through her breast. Red ribbons meant to stand in for her blood flutter down to the stage. The dancer falls. Her true husband finally comes home to find her body lying cold, and the curtain comes down. A tragedy.
A little heavy-handed, thought Hazel. But Le Grand Leon was never the place for subtlety. Last month, they had premiered another story with more or less the same plot—a beautiful young virtuous woman led astray—only that time it had been by a foreign vampire who tempted her with gold and jewels before he consumed her heart.