The Identity I Cannot Reveal

Why was that? Nothing in Herman’s expression had changed, and yet he plainly looked as though something did not sit well with him.

All at once his grip on my hand tightened, and instinctively my eyes dropped to it.

I mustn’t let myself dwell on every little gesture like this.

It was only a husband taking his wife’s hand. Nothing strange in it, the most natural and obvious thing in the world.

Feigning indifference, I looked away and let my eyes wander over the crowd filling the opera house.

The ones who had been watching us gave Herman and me faint smiles, but my whole attention was fixed on a single thing, on finding Viscount Ashburn. Or rather, I was using that search as an excuse to ignore the warmth spreading through my hand.

For all that, the Viscount and his wife were nowhere to be seen, not even by the time Herman and I stepped into the opera house’s main hall.

“They don’t seem to have arrived yet.”
“It would appear not.”

Herman nodded slowly and told the attendant showing us to our seats to inform him the moment Viscount Ashburn arrived.

“I should like to meet the Viscount before the performance begins.”
“Of course, Your Excellency. The moment the Viscount arrives, I shall inform you at once.”

Following his lead, we came to a box on the second floor, partitioned off from the seats beside it, with a small retiring room set at the back.

“…What a fine seat.”

Personally, I had never been especially fond of boxes. Without opera glasses the singers’ expressions blurred, and the orchestra’s playing never carried well.

This box, though, was another matter entirely. It faced dead center of the stage, with a clear view down over the orchestra pit below.

“Even without glasses, the view will be splendid.”

I set the opera glasses I had brought on the little table beside my seat. The box we had been given was, in a word, the finest of the fine.

This isn’t a seat you can book just by having money.

How one secured a place at the opera house depended on how often one attended, and the finest boxes, above all, could not be had for mere money. Only patrons of long standing, who had come year after year, held the right of first reservation, and the most sought-after boxes were, more often than not, impossible to book at all. More than that, such seats went first to the theater’s benefactors, so that the mere use of a prime box became a mark of one’s standing.

A seat we could never have reserved under the Drake name, to be sure.

Herman, meanwhile, had shrugged off his jacket and hung it on the wall peg, and now came ambling over toward the seats.

“Does it please you?”

He came to stand beside me, draped an arm over the railing, and looked out over the stage. Every motion flowed so naturally into the next that I quite lost myself in watching him. No, or rather, for a moment he simply left me speechless, shining as he did with some peculiar brilliance today of all days.

“It pleases me. Perhaps because it’s been so long, I find I’m rather looking forward to it, too.”
“I hadn’t known you were fond of opera. I’ll take out a season ticket, then — we might come together now and again.”

It was an easy proposal, tossed off without weight. The trouble was that against so light a suggestion, my own heart was anything but.

“…No. That’s all right.”

I answered as though in passing, then hurriedly shook my head. A season ticket, of all things. That amounted to saying we would see every performance of the year together. It would have been simple enough to nod along and let the moment pass, but I could not, for the life of me, promise him a future that would come to nothing. Not one of this year’s performances would we see together, after all, not even the very next.

“That face again.”
“Sorry?”
“The look of someone with a bitter draught set before them, loath to swallow it, I mean.”

At his words I hastily raised a hand to my own face. I had been trying, in my own way, to keep from showing what I felt, and words that saw clean through to my heart set it lurching in spite of me.

“I ask only on the off chance, but — have I done something to wrong you—”

Just as Herman murmured the words low against my ear, it came. Knock, knock. Someone was rapping at the door of the box.

“Your Excellency, I have brought the Viscount Ashburn and his lady.”

So the Viscount had arrived after all, and had come to our box in person.

“Ah, Viscount Ashburn. Come in, come in.”

Without a moment’s delay Herman opened the door himself and welcomed the Viscount and his wife inside. The two smiled with graceful poise and inclined their heads.

“Do step inside, if you please.”

At Herman’s gesture they moved gladly into the box, and before long the four of us sat across from one another at the retiring-room table, breaking the ice with small, everyday talk. We shared no particular intimacy, but since the occasion was not a formal one, the mood was a good deal easier for it.

“There was a man at the racecourse last week who won the greatest sum on record. Lord Lester, I mean. I’d never have guessed the fellow was so lucky.”

Herman nodded and answered the Viscount in kind.

“His luck is rather out of the ordinary, I’ll grant. Wasn’t there a rumor, too, that he’d chanced upon a vein of ore in some land he bought a while back for a song?”

The two men fell to talking of this Lord Lester and his lately-won fortune at the races. For a while I watched the Viscountess Ashburn quietly sip her tea, then gestured toward the balcony, suggesting we take in the stage together.

The Viscountess agreed readily, and we passed through the heavy velvet curtain out onto the balcony.

“This is the first opera Richard has brought out in some years, isn’t it? I was so taken with Lohengrin last year that my hopes for this one run high as well.”
“Why, Duchess Ernst, so you saw Lohengrin too. Of all Richard’s operas, that is the one that left the deepest impression on me.”

She had a great passion for opera. I did not know her particular tastes, but bringing up the most highly praised of Richard’s works made the conversation flow all the more easily.

“That’s right. Such a romantic piece.”
“I think the tragic ending is what made it linger all the more.”

The Viscountess said it in a voice steeped in reminiscence, as though the performance were unfolding before her again.

“The Act Three aria especially — Lohengrin’s Farewell — I truly cannot forget it.”

I agreed that the tragic ending was what made it linger all the more, and named the Act Three aria that had impressed me above the rest.

“My goodness, so you felt just the same, madam. I did too. The cello and oboe solos were so very affecting. To tell the truth, I had quite a time of it that day, holding back tears where no one could see.”

The Viscountess was delighted, marveling that I should see things so exactly as she did.

“It was Lohengrin that made me a devotee of Richard’s. And so these past months I have waited for this day and this day alone, brimming with anticipation.”

She went on to ask whether I knew that the music from the wedding scene in Lohengrin had once been played at the wedding of a royal house in another country¹, and added that she dearly hoped the same music might one day play at her own daughter’s wedding as well.

“Truly, there is nothing for it but to try a thing for oneself, is there.”

The Viscountess said this at the end of our long talk, and, not knowing quite what she meant by it, I tilted my head.

“I mean the groundless rumors that have swirled about the Duchess. Had I known you were someone I would get on with so well, I should have kept up an open, unguarded acquaintance with you all along.”

She gave me a smile friendlier than any yet.

“Thank you for thinking so kindly of me, madam.”
“Oh, come now — what would you say to taking a meal together after the performance? I should so like to talk more with you, Duchess.”

Her invitation was warm and kind. And yet the moment I heard it, an unaccountable discomfort closed tight around my chest.

“Ah…”

I smiled awkwardly, faltering over any answer. The Viscountess plainly saw me as ‘Gloria.’ Which meant her kindness, all her goodwill, was aimed not at Marienne, but at the mask she wore: the shell called Gloria.

Strangely enough, the ones who took me for ‘Gloria the madwoman’ were the easy ones to deal with. Before them I had no need to stand on courtesy at all. I had only to keep the Gloria mask fixed stiffly in place, meet their hostility with indifference, and that was the end of it.

But with someone who came to me full of goodwill like this, I hadn’t the faintest idea what to do, or how to do it. To let my true self show and still meet her under the name ‘Gloria’ felt like nothing so much as setting out, of deliberate purpose, to deceive her.

By then I understood it fully: I was not prepared to accept another’s kindness under the name of Gloria. No, it maddened me, to be given goodwill meant for me but offered to Gloria’s name instead.

In that very moment my eyes met Herman’s, as he swept the curtain aside and stepped out onto the balcony. And for some reason, even his tender gaze seemed fixed not on me, but on Gloria.