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Both Ways: Chapter 3

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"Vos pieds! Vos pieds!"

On legs that displeased her, Madame Quirion used willow. The branch spanned six foot, slender as a horsewhip, stripped of its bark. Her dancers never knew when it was coming. Madame always stood on a chair in the orchestra pit, while the offending girl might be moving at the back of the stage. She would wait. She knew at what point the legs in question came within reach of her weapon, and though she looked frail the speed of her strike could make lightning jealous. And like lightning, the willow made no noise. The dancers heard only its effect.

They had fallen into pairs stage front when a cry of 'Sweet Jesus!' went up, and the newest girl fell like a dropped marionette. She left her partner without space to execute the next steps. Her skirt was trodden on, but she would not move. Nola waited until the number called for a gentle chassé to the left, and as she passed the body she hissed, "Get up or they put you back on the boat."

"Let them try," the girl snarled. But she stood and rubbed her ankle, caught up with her partner and tried not to limp. "Allons," called Madame, "now dip, and dip. But not like cow maids-."

Cow meds, the way she heard it. Nola rolled her eyes. Fancy Sir Howard saying it was the Irish who spoke badly. In all the time she'd been his mistress, he never made her an exception to that rule, though Mrs. Martin called her well-spoken and she was a lady, or must have been. But it worried her, that he still found fault. To make amends she practised every morning: scraps of conversation overheard in the promenade, lines remembered from a previous night's play. Surely it put her leaps and bounds ahead of a French woman.

"Now dip, and dip..."

Howard might pay for French lessons, if she picked the moment to ask. On the occasions he saw fit to compliment her, he'd say she had the complexion to be foreign. He called her mi piccola Signorina Bianca. Drunken talk, that was how it started, then he remembered the name when sobered and it stuck. It gave him sure and long-lasting pleasure to treat her as two different women, since the second was his invention. She played the game because it brought him out of bad moods, especially in the beginning when her pronunciation was poor. Eventually she learned the secret of the 'nyah' in signorina: set the tongue behind the front teeth and push the sound through the nose.

"And spin - no, no no mademoiselle! Qui est-ce? Tell me, elle avec le nez laid?" Madame pointed. The pianist stumbled over his keys; the dancers halted. They kept their line, roughly speaking, checked their costumes, stared at the floor. Nola pretended to lace her slippers.

"Who?" Madame insisted. She leaned over so her chin rested on the stage, thrust her whole arm between the footlights and flailed at them with her switch. They'd been careful to stand out of reach.

"Lizzie," the new girl identified herself.

"Pourquoi stiff as starch? You will get fat hips, ma douce, when you are old. Even now the movement is heavy, heavy. Why did you all stop? Allez, allez, from two bars before the turn!"

Devil piss on you, Nola thought. The marrow in her bones hurt, a comfort if only because it meant she still had bones. Hunger scraped away at the middle of her, made her feel the piano notes passed right through