The Prime Minister's Secret Agent(31)
“I wouldn’t have missed seeing you for the world,” Maggie said, squeezing her friend’s waist. “Lead or corps.” She knew it wasn’t her friend. She knew it was none of her business. And yet, she just couldn’t stay away. “Wait here,” she told Sarah.
Maggie made her way over to the ballerina’s body. “How is she?” she asked the man in tweed kneeling beside her. Atholl was holding vigil next to him. Maggie could see the woman in black—the wife—looming over his shoulder.
“Thready pulse, weak heartbeat, I’m afraid,” the doctor said. “Everyone thinks of these girls as sprites and sylphs, but they’re athletes. They push just as hard as Jesse Owens did in the Olympics.”
Estelle’s already-pale skin was covered in white pancake makeup. But Maggie noticed some black spots, blister-like sores that had come through on Estelle’s collarbones, where the makeup had sweated off. Her eyes narrowed. “What are those?”
“I’ve been a pediatrician for nearly forty years,” the doctor said, looking up at Maggie, “and I’ve never seen anything like them in my life.”
He put his fingers to the carotid artery at the ballerina’s throat and listened for breath. His eyes met Maggie’s; he shook his head.
The conductor stood. He shrugged off his wife’s concern, heading out to one of the fire doors and opening it with a reverberating echo. “Richard,” his wife called, her heels clattering, “you’re making a spectacle of yourself!”
The doctor gently closed Estelle’s eyelids, then rose. “Cancel the ambulance. Someone will need to call the police, too.” He cleared his throat and lowered his head. “I’m afraid she’s dead.”
Oh, dear God. Maggie looked at Sarah. Her eyes were blank with shock. One of the other sylphs staggered and nearly fell, but was held up by her fellow dancers.
Madame de Valois emerged from the wings and clapped her hands together. Everyone stopped and turned to her, a vision in violet. Madame walked forward from the shadows of the wings to Estelle’s body. She bent to her knees and kissed the dead girl’s cheek. Then, slowly, she stood.
“Girls and boys of the ballet,” she began in a plummy voice. “Of course all of our prayers are with Estelle and her family at this time. Estelle died doing what she loved to do most—dance. Let us have a moment of silence.”
Her dark eyes scanned the lines of dancers. “Where is Sarah Sanderson?”
Sarah took a small step forward. “Yes, Madame?”
“As understudy, you will be performing the role of the Sylph until further notice.” Madame clapped her hands again. “That is all.” And she strode off the stage.
The dancers erupted into fits of whispers. The officials arrived with a stretcher for Estelle’s body, looking even tinier and more delicate in death than it had in motion on the stage. The dancers stood wide-eyed and mute now, unable to comprehend what had just happened.
Sarah put her hand on Maggie’s arm. “I need to get out of here.”
Together they climbed the back stairs to the corps dressing room. It was narrow and windowless, lined with lighted mirrors, the counters littered with pans of eye shadow and tubes of lipstick. There was a pincushion on the counter, a porcelain Hitler, bent over, with straight pins bristling in his fabric bottom. And in the corner, an enormous bouquet—white roses, yellow laburnum, and purple carnations. It was arranged in the Victorian tussy-mussy style, petals just beginning to fall, water turning brackish.
Maggie had learned the symbolism of flowers in literature from an English class at Wellesley. She had even written a paper on flower imagery in Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray. She’d never liked writing papers, but was enthralled by the idea of sending coded messages through flowers, called floriography. The New England college classroom seemed very long ago and far away—certainly a world away from Edinburgh at war.
“These are—were—Estelle’s,” Sarah said, walking to the flowers and bending down to sniff. “Ouch!” she cried.
“Are you all right?”
“Damn thorns,” Sarah mumbled, sucking at her finger.
“ ‘But he who dares not grasp the thorn, should never crave the rose,’ ” Maggie quoted. It was easier to quote from novels than think about Estelle.
“Honestly, I have no idea what you’re talking about half the time.” Sarah gave a crooked smile and sat down to wipe off her makeup. “I wish I’d gone to university, like you, kitten.”
“It’s a quote from Anne Brontë—and I wish I could go en pointe, like you. I’m so clumsy most of the time.” Maggie remembered seeing John in Berlin and almost falling before they could embrace. She wished that she could tell Sarah all about Berlin, and John, and even the Black Dog—but she couldn’t.