Cinderella Six Feet Under(33)

Ophelia looked around the corner again. Many paces away, Austorga was speaking to a thin, elegantly dressed woman of about forty years, with striking black eyebrows and a pointy nose. The woman appeared to be annoyed, and Austorga was getting worked up.

“Can you hear what they’re saying?” Ophelia asked.

“No. And we might consider hurrying if you wish to investigate that costume before the end of the second act.”

They darted inside Polina Petrov’s dressing room and shut the door.

Polina Petrov’s dressing room was catawampus and smelled of greasepaint and talcum powder. Gas globe lamps hissed softly on either side of the dressing table mirror. Jars of face powder, hairbrushes, curling tongs, and rouge were scattered across the top. A sagging divan overflowed with garments, and a folding screen concealed a corner of the room.

Penrose held a battered ballet slipper up by its ribbon. “Good lord, this smells like my brother’s basset hound.”

Ophelia went straight to the garment rack. She pulled out one of the costumes. “Here it is. Yes. It’s exactly like the one Sybille was wearing in the garden. Sybille’s was longer, and not quite as—as decorated-looking, I suppose.” She touched the silver and gold embroidery on the skirt.

“What could she have been mixed up in?” Penrose said. “Playing at Cinderella. Why?”

“What if she was some sort of understudy for the role in the ballet? Or what if she wished, for some mad reason, to be Cinderella? Wait a moment.” Ophelia frowned. “I know why this costume looks more decorated—it’s the bodice. Sybille’s bodice was much simpler, just plain, ivory-colored silk. It hadn’t got this thing on it.” She ran her fingertips over a large, triangle-shaped panel on the front of the bodice. The panel sparkled with crystal beaded flowers stitched on with gold thread.

“A stomacher.”

Ophelia glanced up at Penrose. She’d heard a faint note of excitement in his tone. “That’s right. A stomacher. In the Varieties, we always had them on our Shakespeare costumes. Old-fashioned, they are.”

“In the Charles Perrault version of ‘Cinderella,’” Penrose said slowly, “the elder wicked stepsister wears red velvet with French trimming, and the younger a gold-flowered cloak and a diamond stomacher.”

“But this isn’t the stepsister’s costume.”

“True. But the more pressing concern is, if Miss Pinet’s gown was identical to this costume, with the exception of the stomacher—and you’re certain they are identical?”

“Positively.”

“—then the question is: what happened to the stomacher on Miss Pinet’s gown?”

“I know what’s happening here, Professor, and I can’t say I fancy it.”

“I cannot fathom what you mean.”

“Your eyes have that glow about them. Tell me what’s so intriguing to you about the notion of a stomacher.”

“You’ll laugh.”

“What of it?”

“Very well. It came to my attention, when reading a rare first edition of Charles Perrault’s ‘Cendrillon’—he’s the chap from the seventeenth century who penned many of these well-known French fairy tales—”

“Cooked them up, you mean.”

“Not precisely. More, well, committed them to paper and ink, shall we say. At any rate, although the standard versions of the tale assign the diamond stomacher to one of Cinderella’s stepsisters, in that rare first edition, Cinderella herself wore the stomacher when she attended the prince’s ball.”

“What are you angling at? That whoever designed this costume somehow had read that version of the tale?”

“Does it not appear to be the case? Although I have, in all my years of scholarship, never met anyone else who has encountered that version of the tale. The volume was in a forgotten box in a storeroom of a library at the Sorbonne—a university here in Paris. It looked to have been untouched for decades. Although, it was a few years ago that I myself examined it.”

When the professor started rambling about universities and old books, Ophelia felt like a sinking stone. It was easier to make light of his fairy tale obsession. Then the mean little voice in the back of her head couldn’t say, He’s too fine for the likes of you.

“There is more,” Penrose said. “According to that version of the tale, H?tel Malbert was Cinderella’s home—her father’s home, where she lived with her stepmother and stepsisters before she married. Her father was a Marquis de la Roque-Fabliau. The current marquis Malbert, and the Misses Eglantine and Austorga, are direct descendants of a son borne by Cinderella’s stepmother, so they count both the wicked stepmother and Cinderella’s father among their forebears.”