Midnight in Everwood(4)
Olga ignored them. ‘Your balance must be poised and assured. Tilt your face up,’ she snapped with another thud of the cane. She stepped closer, until Marietta was enveloped in the heady scent of Jicky, her trademark perfume; a swirl of lavender and vanilla with an animalistic heart that felt overwhelmingly intimate. ‘Feel the movement, it must be as ephemeral and fleeting as a wing taking flight.’ She raised Marietta’s chin with her cane. Marietta wobbled, struggling to maintain her balance on a single pointe. ‘Ballet resides in your bones; it courses through your blood. For a dancer, it is the very essence of our identity, stripped down to its rawest, most intrinsic parts; you cannot leave it behind any more than you could forsake your own soul. Feel it. Feel the exquisite pain that comes from the purest form of love, for that is what it means to dance ballet.’
Olga walked away. Marietta was dimly aware of her calling for the others to enter and the studio filling with regimented lines of dancers. The air was thick with glances towards her and curious whispers. She took her place at the barre, Olga’s voice still echoing through her.
An uncomfortable prickling gave way to a seeping awareness. She could not sleepwalk through a life of luncheons and dinners and a marriage that would pin her in place, a butterfly with steel pins puncturing its wings, preserved and beautiful in its glass cage though its heart beat no longer.
She needed to set herself free.
Chapter Three
The following week was fleeting and stormy. Rain churned the skies over Nottingham, darkening their evenings and thickening the mood within the townhouse. It seemed the more Marietta tried to hold onto her final days of dancing, the faster they slipped away from her. The dark clouds pressed down on her as rehearsals for the Christmas performance of The Sleeping Beauty grew in intensity, punctuated by discussions and decisions over the dancers’ futures, and the frivolous gossip on Drosselmeier that seemed to be voiced wherever Marietta went. As she stretched at the barre between rehearsals, the conversation of two of her acquaintances fluttered over her.
‘Mother’s cabled to Paris for a sylph dress for my Company audition. I do hope it arrives in time. I shall be most vexed if I have to perform without it; evoking the tone of La Sylphide is paramount,’ Victoria said, pinning her chestnut hair into a glossy bun and dousing herself with a liberal cloud of La Rose Jacqueminot. She let out a theatrical sigh. ‘I do wish my father could write a ballet to showcase my talents; Marie Taglioni was unspeakably lucky.’
Harriet, who was as matter-of-fact as Victoria was inclined to sweeping romanticisms, replied, ‘Someone once informed me that a pair of her pointe shoes were purchased for a sack of rubles by a group of obsessed balletomanes that had them cooked and served with a sauce for dinner.’
Victoria wrinkled her nose. ‘How perfectly ghastly.’
Marietta idly wondered what sauce they had selected.
‘Though you ought to be dancing to your strengths, not appealing to your vanity or romantic fascinations after one too many attempts at ensnaring the latest prospects in town.’
‘You make me sound like a common street girl!’ Victoria laughed a note too high.
Harriet’s smile was saccharine. ‘Perhaps if you stopped pursuing the elusive Dr Drosselmeier, your variation would be perfect by now. I mean, really, you have yet to even meet the man.’
‘I hear no one has had the good fortune to host him yet, though half of society have already started to plan their weddings,’ Victoria grumbled. ‘He’s the most eligible bachelor we’ve seen in quite some time.’
‘I heard he came to possess a fortune under mysterious circumstances and that’s why the man is so secretive.’
Victoria sighed. ‘Perhaps I had better refocus my energy on my variation.’
‘That would be wise. What have you decided to perform for the panel?’
With a belated start, Marietta realised she was being drawn into the conversation. ‘I shall not be auditioning,’ she said with a smile as pinched as her mood. ‘My family have quite forbidden it.’ It had long been ordained that she was to relinquish her dancing and be married at the age of twenty-one, which she would turn on the eve of the new year.
‘Why? Auditioning for the Company is more than a great privilege; it’s an honour.’ Victoria’s hazel eyes gleamed in earnest as she slid deeper into her stretch. Marietta could count the freckles that clambered across the bridge of her nose, plastered over with pale powder in a failed effort to paint them out of existence. ‘Their ballet dancers tour in the finest theatres, perform for the most distinguished of audiences, dance in Paris and Vienna and St Petersburg.’
‘Though it’s different for society women, isn’t it?’ Harriet’s brown eyes held a touch of contempt. As a black woman, her life was contorted with challenges and obstacles that Marietta knew she could never understand. Marietta had been given every opportunity and privilege but Harriet, though she was a ward of Victoria’s uncle, had had to fight to earn her place at the same ballet studio. Marietta’s mother had done nothing to help relations after she had made it clear that she cared not for Marietta’s ‘frivolous dancer friends’, discouraging social invitations between the women. Victoria, Harriet and Madame Belinskaya were never extended an invite for luncheons at the town house nor afternoon tea in the city, and consequently Marietta often found herself on the periphery, longing to be one of their close companions.