Amelie

I shall need a very strong glass of port if I am to tell this tale, dearest.

Yes, thank you.

Mmm. Yes, very fine. Come! Sit around me just so. You know, I have never known such diversity in my life, as I have seen here. This is very similar to how I used to hold my court at the House, except… different. We are all such equals here [subtext: equal in death].

Arnold, be a dear and turn down the volume on the gramophone. What a wonderful device!)

Ahem, so, yes, my tale. Where to start?

Yes, of course– my childhood. I know: it must be so hard to believe that I had one. Don’t I look my age? Oh, you’re so kind! (Ha ha!) Thank you, my dear. Such a wonderful compliment, don’t you think Maria

So… my childhood: I was raised in my mother’s dressing room at the opera house. I was raised by the coloratura and the rats. How glamorous! (Ha ha!) No, no, I had no father– I barely had a mother! I should say instead: my father was the stage light; my mother, the dim light of the moon through the curtains

I should say instead: my father was the stage light; my mother, the dim light of the moon through the curtains. The casts, always moving, always rotating, called me a little ghost, for I would roam the hallways in the dim hours after the opera had ended, while my blood was still aflame from the excitement my mother’s voice elicited in me, in everyone. I would waltz across the stage as the ballerinas did, sat in the boxes as the noblewomen did, dared to enter the queen’s box, too. At six, I knew, standing in the candlelight on the stage, that I would master the stage, and the heart and blood stream of everyone who heard me.

At eight, I formally began my training. I followed the lead of the ballerinas in their practises, watched and studied their movements, mimicked them, performed them better. I practised arias, ariosos, all I could get my hands on, in the shadow of the greats. But I was prohibited from capturing the stage until I was sixteen.

(Yes, you are quite right. The world suffered for that absence. However, let me give my master some credit: I could not have been as good as I was had I taken the stage earlier. I needed to let my vocals develop to achieve perfection.

What an excellent drink this is! Another, Arnold. Merci.)

Ah, yes, well. At sixteen, too, my first man came to my door. I was no longer living in my mother’s dressing room. She had gone… I know not where, but she was gone. I had a dressing room of my own, and a bedroom attached to it. Rosario Bruno, the opera director, assured me that I would earn enough in no time so as to buy an apartment of my own. In any case, the money from the men, the opera, the dances, and the gifts gave me a life of much luxury. My dresses were only of the height of fashion– the puff sleeve and wasp waist was very popular then, quite unlike the shapeless sacks the women of the world are wearing now

My world was a lifetime of bright lights and staccato, and of low candlelight and murmured voices. It was glorious. I drank and ate as I wished, indulged as my heart so desired. My rooms became social havens for anyone and everyone. People, noblewomen, may have shamed me for it, but I have no regret. No… no regrets at all.

Except… no, no that doesn’t matter. A few hours of pain, some nights of… they were nothing. (Ha ha…) Nothing at all.

I am here, of course, a little earlier than expected. Than I expected of course. But maybe I was the only one not expecting it. I had been at the House for two decades and a half, and there was always a great excitement when a person of interest came around. This specific person of interest happened to be a so-called fortune teller. (Perhaps the “fortune” aspect of it was not so truthful, eh?) As was expected of me, I went to her, one of the first. The room in which I met her was dim, candlelit, a stereotype of all the plays and pictures, in one of the smaller offices of the opera house. I still see it so vividly in my mind. She read my palm, frowned, made me draw her cards– frowned. I asked her what my fortune was. She told me, death.

Fortune-telling had always been just a fad, purely supernatural, to me– me, who was once a little ghost roaming the halls. Still, it shook me, and I left quickly.

The fortune-teller knew. And to me, every face I looked into seemed to express the sense that they knew too. And of course, I have since believed that the man, the man who first came to me at sixteen, that he knew that I was going to die the moment I finally rejected him.

(But now I’m here, drinking this port, breaking bread with you, finally beyond the walls of the House in which I haunted.