Segno

Anais caught Dolores mimicking en pointe, balancing on the tips of her toes all by herself.

What on earth are you doing?

Under Anais's pointed stare, Dolores made up her mind and confessed that she had taken an interest in ballet.

"Keep it a secret."

"Why?"

"You know perfectly well Dad would hate it."

"He probably would, but you never know until you try. Ask Mom and Dad for lessons. It looked silly just now, sis, but it was also kind of impressive."

Anais seemed utterly indifferent to the whole thing, yet she never once looked down on Dolores for it.

Looking back now, that little sister's encouragement had been the spark that lit Dolores's first real courage.

The first time in her life she dared to ask her parents for something, the result was devastating.

Her mother's reaction to ballet as a dance genre amounted to little more than polite skepticism, but her father flew into a furious rage. Day after day came the shouting: stop twisting your body about like that.

The root of his prejudice was that in Victuria, his homeland, dancers had for the most part belonged to the lowest classes.

But this was Beloff, she argued, where plenty of children from comfortable families learned ballet as a hobby.

Even so, her father was not a tender enough man to lend an ear to an eleven-year-old girl.

Why, even now, five years after leaving, does Father still live in Victuria?

Despite her father's violent opposition, Dolores refused to give up.

She discovered in herself a stubbornness that startled even her. She wheedled and pleaded again and again, catching her father in a good mood or sheltering in her mother's softness, begging to learn ballet.

Anais, whom she had carefully coaxed into the scheme, and Pablo pleaded along with her. We want our sister to do ballet!

And so, about a year later, in the summer she turned twelve, her mother—moved to pity by a small daughter's longing—gave her secret permission, on the condition that her father never find out.

A triumph, if ever there was one. Dolores began private ballet lessons once a week on Mondays and Wednesdays—private tutoring, mind, not the ballet classes offered at the parish school.

The school lessons were off the table, since they were recorded on her semester report card.

"This is the girl, then?"

The ballet teacher who took charge of Dolores's private lessons turned out to be a celebrated ballerina named Marguerite Salle, once of the Aquigneux Public Orchestra and Dance Troupe.

"A touch tall, but suitably slender. Her arches aren't high, but the flexibility across the instep is lovely. Turnout, though... dreadful. Ah—don't look so crestfallen, dear. For a child who's never had proper instruction, we're far too early to be discussing talent. Madame, you needn't fear I'll neglect your daughter. I shall teach her with everything I have."

Her mother's connections shone once more.

Marguerite, it was said, was so extraordinary a ballerina that even the opera troupe in Lenore had tried to summon her.

Indeed, in Dolores's eyes she was a magnificent teacher.

It seemed almost a waste that she spent her days giving private lessons in a small town like Aquigneux—so much so that one day, unable to contain her curiosity, Dolores asked:

"Teacher, why don't you perform on a big stage?"

It was a question thrown out without any notion that it might be wrong.

Marguerite's eyes reddened in an instant. Dolores could not know what story lay behind it, but even a child's heart could understand this much: her teacher carried some old wound.

"Living without grand ambitions, teaching children like you—it's a good life too. Because now, dance is all that I am."

It was much later that Dolores learned Marguerite had loved someone, been all but abandoned by him, and had shut herself away in this small town of her own accord ever since.

An abyss, no doubt—an emotion beyond any attempt to fathom. And yet in that moment, hearing her teacher declare that dance had become the whole of her life, Dolores felt something move deeply within her.

For whenever Dolores herself slipped on her soft ballet shoes and stood before the mirror, she too was seized by a dizzying, roofless exhilaration.

"...I think I understand, somehow."

"You do?"

Marguerite gave a short laugh, as if genuinely delighted.

"When will I be able to walk on my toes like you do?"

"Hmm—when you've learned to listen to the music, and your feet have learned to speak as though writing poetry, the talent you carry will shine like a star. You'll become an étoile yourself."

"I love music already, though. I listen so carefully."

"Opening your heart is a different thing entirely from simply listening. What I have experienced is... something like that. When you and the music begin to speak to each other, it feels as though you yourself are vanishing away. And then you fall endlessly, endlessly in love. As though you might dance on with the music as your escort and drop dead mid-turn—and no, perhaps that would be the most beautiful death imaginable."

For that moment at least, Marguerite looked like someone drunk on something.

As though the mere imagining of sweeping across a grand stage were the only thing that kept her breathing. Dolores imagined that feeling every single day.

In the winter she turned thirteen, her life met its first wave of blue.

That night remains in her mind among the blurred memories of those years like a single stroke of thickly overpainted color—the only one that stayed vivid.

Lessons had ended long since. With a yellow muffler wound about her neck, Dolores watched the falling snow beyond the window with rising unease as she waited for her mother.

Not a single carriage passed down the road; only the gas lamps along it flickered. As the minutes stretched on, fear swelled inside her chest.

It was an anxiety that had been growing sharply of late—a vague, formless terror that one day she might never see her family again.

That day, as if the dread had turned into reality, of all days an enormous snow fell near their house, and her mother could not come for her.

"You only have to stay with me for one evening. Why worry so much?"

"...I don't know."

"Dolores, you're a bright, clever girl, so you must already know how very much your mother loves you."

Dolores found herself crying for no reason at all. She missed her mother, missed her father, missed Anais and Pablo.

Nowadays she understood how adolescence visits a child's heart, but back then she couldn't tell what was sadness and what was fear—only that they blurred together.

Marguerite came toward her with the crisp tapping of the pointe shoes she so envied, and drew her into a warm embrace.

"Then shall I tell you a secret of mine tonight?"

her teacher whispered, like the snow falling outside.

"A secret?"

"Yes. We're going on an adventure."

Segno.

It began with a plié. The knees folded softly, and the body met the music.

Then a relevé—the body, held for a moment in suspension, rose lightly as though it had forgotten gravity.

Marguerite, dressed in an elegant silk gown, moved across a carpet of geometric pattern like a single butterfly in flight.

Tendu. Her toe drew a long line, pressing the floor away. Then a relevé, and a tendu once more.

As the music sank lower, her foot skimmed the floor and rose, cleaving the air.

One leg swept up above the knee into a passé, seamless, and from there—without a single ripple—into arabesque.

The long line of her back unfolded like a mountain ridge, beautiful, and her gaze, fixed toward some far horizon, was brimming with longing.

Then a slight fold of the body into attitude—and the instant the sound of the viola swelled, as though it had been waiting for exactly that moment, she rose onto the tips of her toes and began to turn. And she turned, and turned, and turned again...

As the final rotation stilled, the music came to its end.

The dance ended with it.

Marguerite spread her arms wide, gathered them in with grace, and bowed—and stood gasping for breath.

Dolores watched how her throat rose and fell, how her fingertips trembled, how her breathing came. It was a performance that filled the chest to bursting.

"Passable."

said a woman with richly curled brown hair swept neatly back.

It was an appallingly rude thing to say.

To watch a ballet like that and offer nothing more than passable.

The arrogant audience chattered freely among themselves.

With Madame Roux's discerning eye, I suppose this much was to be expected. A ballet well suited to savoring on an atmospheric evening like this one. Truly, Madame Roux's artistic sensibility is...

Dolores could not comprehend it. How could anyone judge Marguerite's performance that way? Who was this Madame Roux, anyway, that they all fawned over her so?

But Marguerite, as though long accustomed to it, bowed her head and withdrew from the stage—though it was less a stage than a narrow dais at the back of a spacious, crude drawing room.

The place Marguerite had brought her to was the salon of a woman named Madame Anne Roux.

Lord Raymond Roux was a public official who commanded considerable respect in Aquigneux, but his wife Anne was more famous still.

If Madame Rocheise de Moltemar held great sway in the western provinces, then in Aquigneux at least, Madame Anne Roux outranked even Madame de Moltemar.

Madame Roux opened her salon once a quarter, spending her evenings with a select circle of notables.

And Marguerite, each time the salon convened, performed briefly for the guests—a kind of side occupation.

A despairing feeling, and rightly so. While she waited numbly for Marguerite to return, Dolores listened to the voices drifting past her—sharp as pen tips, as letter openers, as broken fingernails.

...Such ridiculous, shallow women. ...As I was saying at the weavers' guild last time, apparently this clothing house called Crepon is on the rise... You can't be serious. What creativity could one expect from men who grow mustaches and strut about? ...Bonnell is still nothing but a rookie. ...Come to think of it, have you heard? ...I have relatives in Lenore... Did the Kiwis' assembly get blocked? A law was passed this time... How promising...

There's been so much talk lately. Ah, and the Romerto Journal ran a piece on it the other day. A certain gentleman with ties to Count Peregrine's nephew received an invitation, you see... Then he's as good as a stranger, isn't he?

Embedded in the countless conversations were sharp little thorns.

Oh, and take Baron Villi, who moved in recently. He's one of the 'transplanted,' naturally?

Of course he is. You can feel it from the name alone. The unpleasantness.

Without quite meaning to, Dolores hunched her shoulders.