It was the third act, the candles round the orchestra pit had burned down to their drip pans, and Hermia was dying on stage. In the dark corners of her vision Ottilie could see ushers striking matches against their boxes, the tiny flames like a solemn procession on Christmas Eve, before the bells. They would light the oil lamps soon, and the audience would slowly be drawn from the dream of the stage into the dark evening world, waking to the night and the fire. They’d stand, legs shaking from the blood, and stagger out where they would laugh and chatter and round up the high-whinnying horses with the ribbons in their tails and run all the way home, buoyed by the performance. The next day they’d struggle to recall the details of so-and-so doing this-and-that and did you see who fell on the stage? Well isn’t that a shame, a shame, such a shame… Ottilie always lost herself in the performances, or at least the very best ones. To see a play was to fall asleep, and she would dream a dream beyond her consciousness. The first time she saw Carmen, the lights had blinded her so brightly when she awoke that she thought of the sun outside her window, and was astonished to find herself in the Royal Theater instead. Even when she didn’t dream, she acted that she did, watching the play rapturously as her mind wandered. Her mind wandered too when her grandfather would slip into his waking dreams. There was no play to enchant him away from verisimilitude, only brief reprieves between the coughing fits and pains of consumption. And yet, when she’d feed him water from a flask, his pretty, glassy eyes would stare up at the ceiling as though he were the one watching Hermia die, and she’d pretend to watch him dream even while her mind galloped away from her like the palomino horses with the ribbons in their tails, over park and over pale… She’d been pulling on the buttons of her glossy gold coat, a fine dupioni, when her grandfather had died. He had pulled in his last breath like the rattle of an orchestra before the finale, but the music had never followed. She’d sat there plucking at the buttons in anticipation until she finally called for her father. They’d lined up the horses outside the manor, their coats shaggy with the winter air because her father had never bothered to travel to Spain, and their tails had no ribbons. Instead, they had donned them with limp yellow carnations, and the horses had danced back and forth with impatience as they brought out the coffin, now filled. All the way down to the plot, the horses had danced back and forth, nostrils puffing smoke like chimneys in the Ton, like fog over the far out green that lay dead before them. The body smelled like burnt wax, a reminder of the candles that had 22
Act Three | Emma Harden
