Carl tries to edge Zara away from the crowd.
The girl doesn’t budge. “You want to talk to me? Now?” Zara shakes her head. The motions are larger than necessary, as if she’s playing to a house of a thousand instead of an audience of one.
Carl knows what that means. She’s gotten herself drunk.
He lowers his voice. “This is about Toby.”
He still can’t believe that his good-hearted friend took Zara to the Dragon and Bottle. It was a poor choice. But then, Toby has never been known for his wonderful decision making.
Zara stands on her tiptoes, scouring the ballroom. “I’m looking for someone. Excuse me.” She strides away, and Carl’s first impulse is to grab her, to keep her with him until he can explain a few important things. But he doesn’t dare touch this girl.
Instead, he follows at a close distance. “Please. This will only take a minute.”
She looks back at him, her face as transparent as window glass. Even when she isn’t tipsy, her emotions have a way of showing through. It’s what makes her a fine actress. At least, when she’s in control of herself.
He hopes, for a fleeting moment, that her career survives this production.
That she survives.
“Please,” he says, his voice thinning. “We need to speak.”
Zara lets Carl steer her toward the back of the room. Even here, the sounds of mingling are thick, tangled, hard to talk over.
“You need to stay focused on the play right now,” Carl says.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Zara asks, her amber eyes narrowed.
“Whatever Toby said to you,” Carl says, “forget it. He’s an old drunk.”
“He told me he was your best friend,” Zara says.
“Who better than a best friend to recognize an old drunk?” Carl fires back.
Zara has the glare of truth about her tonight. Carl knows that truth can be a powerful thing, but only if people believe in it. They believe in lies just as often. It all comes down to presentation.
“Toby thinks that you’re worried about what happened to Enna,” Carl says in his most reasonable and reassuring tone. “It’s a simple fact of life. We live at the theater. Some of us die here. Ask Cosima if you don’t believe me.”
Zara crosses her arms, turning from a polished actress into a teenager in one swift motion. He wonders if she has any idea how young she truly is.
“So you think what happened to Enna was normal?” Zara asks.
Carl breathes carefully. Otherwise he will stop being able to speak. He is partly to blame for the girl being here in the first place. He needs to explain this. He owes her that much.
When he sits down in the nearest chair, the glasses on the table bump and resettle with a shiver of crystal. “Leopold does unpleasant things to his actresses.”
“What does that mean?” she asks in a numb voice, a close cousin to a whisper. Carl knows all the variations on whispering. He knows all the ways to speak, and what they mean. He has been an actor for so many years. It should mean that he reads people perfectly.
But he failed when it meant the most.
“When we met, Enna and I were so young,” Carl says. “We were in love, and playing two people in love. You can imagine Leopold enjoyed that. He couldn’t have orchestrated it better himself. But then a few seasons later, he cast Enna in the role of a ruined woman. And she became one. There were drugs. And men. Enna didn’t hide her indiscretions. In fact, she shouted them from the rooftops.” Carl’s heartbeat takes over his body, drowns out the crowd. “For years, I didn’t know the truth. I had no idea where it started.”
Zara sits down next to him, and it’s like everyone else in the ballroom vanishes. He’s left alone with a story that feels impossible to tell, and a girl who needs to hear it. “Our happiness no longer suited Leopold. He forced her to sleep with him, did she tell you that?”
Zara tries to blink away confusion, then pain.
Carl is spitting the words now. “He did degrading things to her, all in the name of the play. He was her director. He told her it was the only way to make her believable in the role.”
“She could have told someone,” Zara says, but she doesn’t sound as if she’s convinced herself. Leopold was so famous, so well loved. His productions were intense and beautiful, and if he was known for being unorthodox with his actors, well, that was what they’d signed up for, wasn’t it? That was the price of genius.
Who would Enna have told?
Who would have believed her if she cried rape?
Carl might have — he needs to believe that he would have — but Enna’s ability to trust had already been destroyed. She chose alcohol and pills as her comforts. Carl only learned all of this later, much later.
From Meg.
“Why did she keep coming back to the Aurelia?” Zara asks. She is trapped in this terrible story with him. It’s a tiny room with no doors and no windows, a room that there is no real escaping from. “Why did you?”
“I didn’t know. Not for the longest time. As for Enna . . . she didn’t want to stop acting, and Leopold was one of the only directors who would still work with her once her . . . reputation spread.”
Zara is shaking and shaking her head, as if that could make it untrue.
“Now he’s pushing you,” Carl whispers, the words a rumble in his chest. “And I never wanted that. But I had to save her. I had to.”
Zara swallows. It sounds dry and painful. “Save Enna?”
“No,” Carl says. “It was too late for that. It was like . . . she died years ago. I had to stop him from doing the same things to Kestrel.”
Carl is the closest that Kestrel has to a father. He watched her grow up. Took her to plays and dinners, bought her presents. He nursed her through her first heartbreak. There was no way he was letting Leopold have her.
Carl watches as understanding comes over Zara in a fuzzy patchwork. “You . . . You’re the one who stopped Kestrel from being cast as Echo.”
And suddenly the rest of the world rages at full volume, because they’re no longer alone. Kestrel has circled all the way around the room and come over to see them. She hovers behind Zara, who said that last stupid sentence without knowing Kestrel was right there.
Her dress is a blaze of blue. She’s gotten too thin. Carl can see her bones, like they’re trying to cut their way out through her skin. “I thought it was so nice to see you two talking,” she says in a shaky voice.
And then the screaming starts.
“Not here,” Carl says. But Kestrel’s mouth is stretched out, and her voice is strong. She has terrible nerves. Ever since she was a girl and her parents left for the first time of many, trusting her to the care of their ridiculous friends, she’s had these fits. Carl grabs her by the upper arm. “Sweetie, please. Everyone is watching.” The journalists gather, flies around a sticky-sweet spill. He doesn’t want them spreading stories about her in the morning. “Talk to me,” Carl says. “Just talk.”
Kestrel nods, and breathes, and it’s like watching a self pour back into her body. “I read for Echo five times. Leopold didn’t want me. Something was wrong. I knew it. I knew I was born for that role. Mama says so. Everyone says so.”
Carl nods with sympathy as he pats her back. He hates what he did. But he did it to keep Kestrel safe from a man who would force himself on her. A man who would happily abuse her and then say he was only serving a higher purpose, his art. Carl hates what he did, but he isn’t sorry. He’s done much worse things to keep the people he loves from misery.
Kestrel gives him a murderous look, but Carl knows that it will blow over. It has to. If it doesn’t, he has nothing left. “You were the person I trusted,” Kestrel says. She turns away, the razors of her shoulder blades moving up as she takes a breath. Holds it.
“Kestrel,” Carl says. “Sweetie.”
She picks up a glass from the nearest table. Zara tries to grab her, but Kestrel has gone white-hot, untouchable.
The glass flies.