* * *
THE SHOW ENDED WITH THE USUAL APPLAUSE, and Jack lowering the heavy green velvet curtain, wincing as the rope squeaked on the way down. Isabella beamed at the audience, extended her arms as if she were about to take a dive, and lowered into a curtsy that anyone might have mistaken for a lady’s. And then she ducked back behind the safe wall of the curtain, and her smile fell. The magic spell was over, they were all human again, and the audience was filing into their carriages and complaining about the weather.
Jack would have to be quick if he wanted to catch Isabella before she snuck out the back door and went home. He pulled the music box out from beneath his overcoat, where he had wrapped it to keep it safe, and climbed one-handed down the ladder, keeping it level.
He could hear Isabella in her dressing room—the sounds of movement, the scratch of a candle being lit, the rustling of a skirt—but he couldn’t force himself to knock. Not yet. For the hundredth time, he ran his fingers along the smooth edges of the music box. And then Jack took a deep breath and rapped hard, twice, on the door.
The door swung open before he even finished knocking. It wasn’t Isabella—it was the dance mistress’s daughter, Mary-Anne, a flinty-eyed girl of eight or nine who tidied up and did the hemming on the costumes. “She ain’t here,” she said flatly, looking Jack up and down. Her eyes landed on the music box.
“Do you know where she went?” he asked her, trying his best to twist his mouth into what he hoped was a roguish smile.
Mary-Anne just shrugged. “Didn’t come back after curtain that I saw.”
Jack sighed. And then he heard Isabella’s laugh. He would have known it anywhere, from a thousand miles away, the way her voice pealed like a bell. It was coming through the window from the alley. Jack pushed a crate against the wall and stepped onto it to look out the window below. Why did he do it? Why didn’t he just go inside? Why didn’t he just go to bed, realize that Isabella not being in her dressing room was a kindness of fate and he should forget about her? But half a lifetime in the rafters had given Jack the instinct of silently looking onto other people below. And when Jack stood up against the window, he could see Isabella outside, her arms wrapped around the lead actor, and the lead actor pulling her into a kiss.
The music box slipped from his hand and clattered to the floor. Jack fell from the crate, toppling two false trees. “I’m all right!” he shouted to the people staring, although nobody had asked.
When it hit the floor, the music box had opened and begun to quietly play its tinny melody. When Jack picked it up, he realized that the ballerina had chipped and broken. Gone were her arms and her head and neck and torso. All that was left was her leg, anchoring her to her tiny stage, and the pink hoop skirt of her dress. But she kept spinning, until Jack slammed the box closed.
He climbed back up into the rafters, where he had made his bed and hid his few paltry belongings. He shoved the music box back under his spare coat. He didn’t want to see it anymore; just looking at it made him burn with humiliation. Isabella had been a fantasy, she always had been. What did he think, he would buy her one stupid music box and she would swoon? He didn’t even know if she liked music boxes! He was a fool. No, worse than a fool. He was a romantic fool.
Jack wrapped himself in a discarded curtain and pulled out the wine he kept nestled under some rope, and he drank deeply until the theater was dark and he was left alone in the silence—just the rats in the walls, and mice in the seats, and his own solitary heartbeat.
Edinburgh Evening Gazette
November 11, 1817
SIX MORE DEAD FROM MYSTERIOUS ILLNESS
Six deaths in the last fortnight in Edinburgh’s Old Town have several officials fearing another outbreak of the devastating Roman fever. Four of the bodies remain unidentified—three male, one female—but the other victims have been identified as Davey Jaspar, 12, a shoeshine, and Penelope Marianne Harkness, 31.
Mrs. Penelope Harkness worked as an innkeeper at the Deer and Stag, where she was described by patrons as kind and easy with a laugh. She reported feeling feverish on Friday evening. Her landlord discovered her deceased Sunday morning when she failed to come down to church.
“It’s a terrible situation,” stated William Beecham III, head of the Royal Edinburgh Anatomists’ Society and Chief Surgeon at the King’s University Hospital. “I examined the body myself, and I was horrified to find the lesions on Mrs. Harkness’s back consistent with Roman fever. Obviously, we hope that the disease has not returned to our city, but I must advise caution and vigilance.”